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Anso
July 17th

Portland Art Association
Portland, Oregon

July 5th, 1917.

Mr Charles L Freer,
Detroit, Michigan.

My dear Mr Freer:

For the past eighteen years a class of some fifty women have met at our arm museum, weekly during the winter, for the study of the different periods of art. The coming winter, Oriental art will be their topic. We have excellent facilities here for the study of Japanese prints, as the Ladd collection is housed here, which includes 100, arranged chronologically, which Fenellosa's notes. But there are no Japanese paintings to be seen, and, observing that you have generously lent ten such paintings to the museum at Minneapolis, we feel that it can do no harm to ask whether you would consider lending to us, a few, even one, Japanese or Chinese painting. Next January, or February, would be the most favorable time. The Museum is of the ordinary fire-proof construction. We would desire to know as nearly as possible what the cost of transportation and insurance would be. As there is no insurance companies here who make a business of insuring paintings for a complete trip, it would be far better that that should be done at your end and it is difficult to out the cost here.
Our museum is a very modest one and no doubt it would be impossible to give such works the most desirable setting, but we would do all that we could. I am sending you our last annual report with a photograph I happen to have which shows a portion of one gallery when we had a Hassam exhibition, just to give some little idea of our building.